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She walked with the trolley into a cubicle and asked Joss to help their new patient into a gown then get an ECG started, a blood sat clip on one finger and a cannula in his arm.
‘Do you see the visiting cardiologist?’ she asked her patient, now introduced as Rob Armstrong, who nodded, while Joss bustled about, sticking pads for the electrodes on the man’s body.
Sylvie walked in with a phone in her hand, and Emma moved outside the cubicle to take the call.
After introducing herself, she told him about the patient, whom he apparently knew quite well.
‘And what would you do?’ he asked, and she felt a rush of pleasure. Many specialists would simply dictate their preference.
She told him what she’d do, and was even more delighted when he said, ‘Well done, you! I love knowing efficient ED doctors. It makes for a far better outcome for the patient. Go ahead exactly as you thought, and I’ll be there tomorrow. Unfortunately, he’s got one of those stubborn hearts that will probably need cardioversion to shock it back into normal rhythm but we always try the drugs first. It’s up to you, and available bed space, but I can do the cardioversion in the ED if you decide to keep him there.’
A few pleasantries, a promise from him to phone later for a report, and he was gone. A nice man, Emma decided. She’d look forward to meeting him.
In the meantime, she had a patient to see to. Joss had already taken a list of the medications he was on, and Emma was pleased to see blood thinners on the list.
‘We need to take some blood for testing before we attach the drip, and a chest X-ray—’
Damn, she hadn’t asked the specialist if he wanted an echocardiogram as well.
Decided to leave it. She’d ask him when he phoned and could do it then if he wanted one.
She wrote up the details of the drug delivery, and, as a radiographer came in with the portable machine, she explained it to Joss.
‘No worries,’ Joss assured her. ‘I’ve been here long enough to have seen Mr Armstrong a few times now. He’s lucky the cardiologist is coming tomorrow. When he can’t have the cardioversion within forty-eight hours, he has to go on drugs to keep him as stable as possible for about a month, not that he complains.’
She hesitated and Emma had a feeling she was being assessed.
‘Actually, he’s a great guy, Rob Armstrong—that’s our patient—he’s an engineer with the local council. Single too.’
Emma frowned at the nurse.
‘And I might be interested in that information, why?’
Joss wasn’t the least abashed by Emma’s cool demand.
‘Oh, just that you’re single, and those boys of yours—well, I think boys probably need a father, you know, to kick a football around with and stuff—so I was just saying…’
‘Take blood for testing then start the drip,’ Emma told her, but Joss’s smirk suggested she hadn’t spoken nearly sternly enough.
Because that little seed of an idea that the boys might need a father had been slowly spreading its roots in her mind?
Because she’d found meeting men in the city fraught with danger and doing just that had been one of the reasons she’d been happy to move to Braxton?
So what if it had been? She was fairly certain it wasn’t written across her forehead.
And she certainly wouldn’t be eyeing up patients as prospective husbands—very unethical—although in a small town most of the men she was likely to meet would be prospective patients!
Yet here she was, on only her second day at work, with someone doing a bit of very unsubtle match-making.
And adding to her confusion over what exactly she did want in the future…
Seeking distraction, she phoned Retford Hospital to enquire about the man with the burns.
He was doing well, she was told, mostly second-degree burns, and he’d now been identified and a friend tracked down. He was, as she’d suspected, a backpacker, walking the track on his own after his friend had picked up casual work at the last village they’d visited.
The person on the other end of the phone already knew who she was—did small town gossip travel from town to town so quickly?—and enquired how she was enjoying Braxton, laughing when Emma explained it was only her second day.
But the conversation made her feel…as if she belonged? As if she’d somehow come home?
Weird!
Not that she had time to consider the strange feeling of belonging, for the day got busier, with a farmer coming in with the skin on his left hand lacerated from being caught in a baling machine he was fixing.
‘Not an everyday thing in a city hospital, I bet?’ he said to her as she cleaned the wound and stitched the tattered skin back together.
